Redgrave became well known in the United States after appearing in the television series House Calls, for which she received an Emmy nomination. She was sacked from the show after she insisted on bringing her child to rehearsals so as to continue a breast-feeding schedule. A lawsuit ensued but was dismissed a few years after. Following that, she appeared in a long-running series of television commercials for H. J. Heinz Company, then the manufacturer of the weight loss foods for Weight Watchers, a Heinz subsidiary. Her signature line for the ads was "This Is Living". She wrote a book of her life experiences with the same title,[2] which included a selection of Weight Watcher recipes. The autobiographical section later became the basis of her one-woman play Shakespeare for My Father.

In 1993 she was elected President of the Players' Club. In 1989 she appeared on Broadway in Love Letters with her husband John Clark, and thereafter they performed the play around the country, and on one occasion for the jury in the O. J. Simpson case. In 1993 she appeared on Broadway in the one-woman play Shakespeare for My Father, which Clark produced and directed. She was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

Voice work[edit]

Redgrave narrated approximately 20 audiobooks, including Prince Caspian: The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis for Harper Audio[6] and Inkheart by Cornelia Funke for Listening Library.[7]

Personal life[edit]

On 2 April 1967, Redgrave married English actor John Clark[8][9] Together they had three children, airline pilot Benjamin Clark (born 1968), singer-songwriter Pema (originally Kelly) Clark (born 1970), and author and photographer Annabel Lucy Clark (born 1981).[10] The marriage ended in 2000 after Clark revealed to Redgrave that he had fathered a child with her personal assistant, who later married (and subsequently divorced) their son Benjamin.[11][12] The divorce proceedings were acrimonious and became front page news, with Clark alleging that Redgrave had also been unfaithful.[13][14]

Death[edit]

She discussed her health problems associated with bulimia and breast cancer. She was diagnosed with the latter in December 2002, had a mastectomy in January 2003, and chemotherapy.[16] She died from breast cancer[17] in her Kent, Connecticut, home[18] on 2 May 2010, aged 67.[19] Her brother, actor Corin Redgrave, who had also been a cancer patient in his last years, had died less than one month previously, on 6 April, aged 70. She was survived by her three children, her six grandchildren and her elder sister Vanessa.[20]

Redgrave's funeral was held on 8 May at the First Congregational Church in Kent, Connecticut. She was interred in St. Peter's Episcopal Cemetery in the hamlet of Lithgow, New York, where her mother, Rachel Kempson, and niece, Natasha Richardson, are also interred.[21]

References[edit]

^The production was not well reviewed in general, but Bernard Levin, writing in the London Daily Express under the headline Are there any more at home like Lynn Redgrave?, wrote that her performance was "an outrageous and unforgivable atrocity on the poor Bard, and it is utterly delightful and almost wholly successful. And this astonishing infant is only 18 vears old!" (25 January 1962). The fact that the critic Levin was actively courting Lynn Redgrave's older sister Vanessa may have been significant.